When people think about dream interpretation, they often think about Freud. I think about Gendlin.
Supercycle has new (free!) monthly dream interpretation jams, and I went to the first one today. It was awesome.
I had already read (and given away) my copy of Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams by Dr. Eugene T. Gendlin, which is the book we use as a reference. This book has a list of questions that you can ask when remembering your dream, free online.
We talked about the general philosophy and then had breakout rooms in which we talked about our dreams in pairs.
One of the things that stood out to me is how easy it is to say “oh yeah I know what my dream means basically I do not need to analyze it,” and then how much richer the integration of the unconscious becomes when you sit down and ask any number of Gendlin’s dream analysis questions.
When I say “any number” I mean that he has a few pages of these, but even if you go through one, or three, there is still a meaningful effect.
Examples:
What did you feel in the dream?
Then ask: What in your life feels like that?
Visualize and sense the lay-out of the main place in your dream.
Where have you been in a place like that?
Vividly visualize the end, or any one important scene of the dream. Feel it again. When it comes back as fully as possible, just watch it and wait for something further to happen. Wait for it, don’t invent anything.
I realized that two back-to-back dreams I had were actually trying to say the same thing, in the way that Hamlet and The Lion King say the same thing, while having completely different content. My “casual analysis” did not catch this: I only caught it after answering the questions in the jam about what the locations of each reminded me of in the past in my real life.
Each of the dreams also had “obvious” tie-ins to real things that were happening in my life this week, that it was easy on a casual reading to miss the symbolic patterns in each of the dream. That is, each of the dreams was finding a symbolic language as a way of showing me something that is in my unconscious.
The guide for the jam, Emily, mentioned that partaking in the experience of reading the symbolic language of dreams as a way to accessing the unconscious is one of the lovely things about dream interpretation. This is a paraphrase, and she is a much better philosophical thinker than I am.
What I love about the book, the set of questions, and the format of doing this with people is that it does turn the object that is [the dream] into something like a text that can be read using a process, before bringing your own potentially biased interpretive frameworks onto [the dream text] right away, and similar to the ways that book clubs can both foster discipline and deepen engagement with a text, dream-book-club has these same benefits and is a fun thing to do with people!